That Seventies Show

CBS’s “Swingtown.”

“Swingtown,” a new summer drama on CBS, is set squarely and pointedly in 1976, the year of the Bicentennial, the year that America—having left Vietnam, having lanced the boil that was Richard Nixon and not yet become annoyed by the President it was about to elect—started to maybe, just a little bit, fall in love with itself again. That, anyway, is one of any number of possible one-sentence summations of the time. By 1976, some of the currents of the sixties—women’s liberation and youth culture—had become mainstream; family men sported longer sideburns; schoolteachers looked a little more unbuttoned; mothers started wearing pants and shorter skirts, and going to work; and divorce had lost most of its shock value. At the same time, the popular culture being generated largely stank—and people just went along with it! It was all so mystifying. And the clothes—ghastly polyester shirts and dresses with geometric patterns that would give M. C. Escher vertigo. In kitchen décor, avocado and harvest gold had shoved white aside. Let’s not even talk about the music. Movies were one of the few exceptions to the horror; “Taxi Driver” was released in early 1976.

This is the world of “Swingtown,” which was created by Mike Kelley, whose production and writing credits include “The O.C.,” “Jericho,” and “Providence.” He grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, the affluent Chicago suburb where the show is set, and turned nine that year. In a recent Times interview, Kelley described his childhood. “I like to think of myself as a ‘bannister-slat’ kid,” he said, meaning that he often sat on the staircase and looked down at his parents’ parties, and was hyperaware of being an observer of the mysterious rituals of the adults he lived among. Of course, all kids watch their parents’ parties—and everything else about their parents—so the problem for a TV writer is how to make a show that goes beyond that perspective and yet doesn’t allow sweeping, Newsweek-y generalities (like the ones in my first paragraph) to stand in for particular experiences of the kind that real people have and fictional characters need. Kelley appears to get that; in the interview, he said that the hook of the show may be its juicy depiction of wife-swapping, but that it’s really about the specific ways in which people embraced the changes of the time. You wouldn’t guess that from the show itself; the first ten minutes of the first episode are like a checklist of seventies references—a woman smoking on an airplane, a woman drinking a can of Tab (I lost a bet with myself over how soon that would show up), a girl putting on Dr. Scholl’s sandals—and the opening scene turns out to be a lewd joke, a kind of homage to “Airplane!,” which, of course, was itself a parody, leading you to wonder right off the bat whether this is going to be merely a late-night version of “That ’70s Show.”

In that first scene, we see a handsome, if slightly sleazy-looking, airline pilot, his jacket and shirt off, who is speaking to the cabin on his cockpit radio, while the top of a blond head moves up and down at the bottom of the screen. (The pilot’s sleazy look is a combination of the International Male mustache and the fact that he’s played by Grant Show, whom you will remember, whether you admit it or not, as Jake, the dangerously sexy downwardly mobile biker on “Melrose Place.”) Can this be, you think? Of course not; it may be 10 P.M., but this is still network TV. When the woman stands up, we realize that she’s a housemotherly, middle-aged stewardess who’s helping him clean up some coffee that a young stewardess accidentally spilled on him. Shortly afterward, that young thing is in bed with the pilot, Tom, and his wife, Trina, who’s played by Lana Parrilla. (And, shortly after that, the wife goes to the kitchen for the Tab. Threesomes—they just make you so darn thirsty.) These two scenes sound pretty risqué, and they are, but they also seem slightly unworthy, like dirty jokes that aren’t dirty enough and so seem even dirtier, in the same way that Bob Eubanks, the icky host of “The Newlywed Game,” made the expression “making whoopee” sound filthy.

It’s the Fourth of July weekend, and a new couple is moving into the house across the street from Tom and Trina’s—the upwardly mobile but likable Susan and Bruce Miller (Molly Parker, who shone in “Deadwood,” and Jack Davenport*, from the original, British version of “Coupling”). Susan and Bruce are leaving behind, in their old, lower-upper-middle-class neighborhood nearby, Roger and Janet (Josh Hopkins and Miriam Shor), who are their best friends in that slightly tense way that suburban couples sometimes are: the two men don’t really know each other that well; one of the husbands doesn’t like the other wife; and one of the women is envious and openly critical of the other. If they hadn’t lived near each other and had kids the same age—two young boys who are friends—they’d have had nothing to do with each other. Janet, a hyper-proper near-hysteric, senses that she’s going to lose Susan as a friend because of the move, and alternately fawns over and needles her.

Kelley and his producing partner, Alan Poul (who was an executive producer of “Six Feet Under” and also directed a number of episodes), appear to have been uninterested in giving Janet a real thought or a genuine feeling. She’s the most rigid of the six main adult characters, who are distributed along the continuum of receptivity to change, and it’s notable—and not in a good way—that she is treated as a joke by Kelley and Poul. (There is a seventh character, Gail, played by Kate Norby, who lives next door to Susan and Bruce’s new house; she’s a blowsy, self-disrespecting cocaine addict, hiding in the shadows—she wears sunglasses indoors and covers her windows with aluminum foil, to keep out the glare of societal disapproval.) Janet has been made to be the stereotypical Creature from the Suburban Lagoon—a Stepford wife, an American Beauty, the distaff half of Ozzie and Harridan, a Mommie Dearest, a Desperate Housewife, and a distillation of every drag performance you’ve ever seen. It doesn’t help that Shor plays up the character’s risibility; following a party at Tom and Trina’s that Janet has stormed out of after coming upon some disturbing sexual activity in the basement (it involved more than two people), Janet is seen at home on her knees, in full housewife regalia—chest-protector apron and rubber gloves—maniacally scrubbing her oven. Her husband hopelessly asks her, “Why don’t you come to bed?” You’d have to have a heart of Teflon not to laugh when she spits at him, “Because we live in a pigsty!” This is TV at its TV-est.

Much of the dialogue in “Swingtown” is as unfortunately memorable as that outburst, partly because none of the adults are allowed to have any self-awareness. They say things like “Who’s up for a Harvey Wallbanger?” At her Fourth of July party, Trina holds a little box out to Susan and says, “Quaalude?,” as if she were offering an Altoid. Susan says she’s never had one. “Then I insist,” Trina says. “It’ll take the edge off.” But Susan hasn’t indicated that she has an edge, or, if she does, that it needs taking off. This is boilerplate seventies-speak, and it doesn’t get at anything beyond itself. AMC’s “Mad Men,” as punctiliously faithful to the externals of the late fifties and early sixties as “Swingtown” is to the mid-seventies, cracks open the dreams and myths of its time; there’s brutality to that show, a willingness to look at the blood pumping through the era’s heart of darkness. But “Swingtown” is a little too fond of the seventies to reveal anything about them that we don’t already know.

According to the Times piece, Kelley and Poul wanted to combine elements of the movie “Boogie Nights” and the TV show “The Wonder Years.” If you can describe your show that easily, you can sell it to the networks but not necessarily to viewers. (“Swingtown” recalls any number of movies and TV shows, from “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” to “The Ice Storm,” with its parents and teen-agers living parallel lives and a smart, odd teen-age girl riding around alone on a bicycle.) “Swingtown,” as part of its fetish for authenticity, has impeccably and precisely horrible costumes and sets, but, to a serious fault, it makes use of the most overplayed music of the period. “Dream Weaver,” “Dancing in the Moonlight,” “Come and Get Your Love,” and other such beige tunes are thrown one after another onto the soundtrack, until your ears are crying. With few exceptions, the songs are not integrated into the show—the characters don’t hear them. They’re there just to pander to viewers of a certain age. The characters in “Swingtown” may be going through big personal changes and having, along with their free sex, some rough times, but I envy them: they have to live through the seventies only once. ♦

*Correction, June 15, 2008: The name is Jack Davenport, not Jake, as originally stated.